


Blackout

by Orockthro



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Gen, Very likely AU after S2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-05-06
Packaged: 2017-12-09 12:29:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 13,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/774199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The machine <i>always</i> knew a good deal but no one was supposed to offer it one. No one was supposed to think they could. “John, what have you done?” </p><p>(Or, Finch and Reese get in over their heads.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This will probably be AU as we finish up the end of S2, but I had to write my version. :)  
> A thousand thanks to the brilliant people (you know who you are) who have read through various iterations of this thing with me, and helped me figure out what the heck it was. Without you folks, I'd still be staring at a google doc and blinking.

It was funny, he thought as the man dropped his arm and let the gun rest against Harold’s forehead just above his glasses, that the metal barrel wasn't cold. Room temperature, warmed from being pressed against the number's side in the police-style shoulder holster. Perhaps it was his dislike of firearms, but he’d always imagined them to be as icy as they were deadly.

Harold stood still. The gun and the arm attached to it had pushed him back into a wall, leaving him off balance with the majority of his weight on his bad leg and unable to shift it. In his brief but immersive experience dealing with very desperate people he'd found blathering rarely had the desired effect. Pointed questions and comments, however, were often at least somewhat effective.

"Mr. Smith--" because of course the number's name was Smith. Harold supposed he should have been happy it was Jacob Smith not John. "--do you really think shooting me in the head will solve anything?"

And then Reese's voice sang in his ear, _"Finch, where are you?"_ Husky and afraid and Harold could tell from the sound of traffic and the man's breathing that he was running at full tilt.

"Shut up. Just shut up. I don't care, okay, it just needs to stop. All of it." The hand on the end of the gun shook and Harold felt the rattle through his skull. If he didn’t end up with a hole in his head by the end of the day there was going to be a ring shaped bruise above his left eye.

"You are being unjustly hunted by a collections agency, Mr. Smith, but splattering my brains on the wall of the King St. Hardware Store will only make your situation that much worse." Harold's leg shook and threatened to give out on him. He thought of Reese, two miles away and on foot, panting in his ear. A long distance comfort. The gun bit deeper against his scalp, and he winced.

“ _I can't make it. I can't get to you in time."_

Harold swallowed. His throat was dry and all he could taste was bitter saliva. "It's going to be okay," he said to one of them more than the other. Now it was Finch's turn to cobble together an apology, a goodbye. He understood how Reese felt in the parking garage now, flooded with things to say and no way to say them.

“ _Harold. I’m sorry.”_ John said.

“Just keep... keep doing what you have to do. That’s all I ask. Please.”

“ _Harold...”_

“No more talking,” Mr. Smith said.

Out of the corner of his eye Harold saw the store owner in his green apron reflected in the convex overhead mirror. The owner edged towards his assailant with a baseball bat clutched in his hands. Harold tried to shake his head, but the gun was pressed hard against him and pinned him to the display rack of keys behind him. If the store owner tried to be a hero there was no doubt in Harold’s mind that he wouldn’t live to discover the outcome of the event. Mr. Smith’s finger rested on the trigger of the gun. Not even a man with Mr. Reese’s reflexes could beat the pull of the trigger.

Then three things happened simultaneously. There was an electric whine, and the power cut out in the store, flooding it with the sort of blackness that was a rarity in the city that never sleeps. In that same instant, Harold’s leg shook one last time before it buckled on him, sending him crumpling to the ground in a pile of stiff limbs, and Mr. Smith shouted in surprise and squeezed off a round into the space Harold’s head occupied a half second earlier.

“Oh Jesus. Oh fuck,” Mr. Smith said, and vomited on the floor near Harold in the black. Harold pressed both hands over his mouth and tried not to moan as his leg and back screamed at him. Mr. Smith staggered into an aisle and towards the exit, illuminated only by the headlights of the cars outside.

Harold lay on the ground in the dark until the store owner fumbled to the entrance and began to talk on his cell phone, frantically raving about a customer who’d shot someone in the head.  He wondered if John could hear the blood rushing in his head, beating against the in-ear headset. He got to his knees and by way of a small miracle made it all the way to his feet. The owner left and with him the sliver of outside light. Harold picked his way to the back and fell out emergency exit by the loading dock. The three steps down to the street gave him more trouble than the twenty flights of stairs up to John, and the roof, and the bomb vest. His hands were shaking almost as badly as his legs, but he clung to the guardrail until his feet were firmly on the pavement.

“Detective Carter,” he said into his ear piece, “there’s a man running down King Street with a gun. Please stop him.”

“Finch?”

He hung up on her. His phone was buzzing; John was calling him he was sure. Instead of tapping his ear to answer he leaned over and vomited into the gutter. The buzzing of the phone against his skull only made his nausea worse, and he was getting disgusted looks from passersby. He limped heavily to the curb and hailed a taxi. He loathed the things, much preferring his hired cars with sanitary seats, but seeing as he was most likely going to be adding to the unsanitary conditions of the taxi, he couldn’t find it in him to complain. He waited until the car pulled into the street before calling Reese.

“Sorry for the delay, Mr. Reese. I’ve sent Detective Carter to collect Mr. Smith. I’ve no doubt she can handle the situation from here.”

“ _Harold…”_

“I believe that concludes the threat. I’m headed back. I’ll call you when we have a new number.”

He hung up and concentrated on not throwing up until the taxi pulled up four blocks from the library, and he paid the man three hundred dollars to strike his fare from the taxi’s record.

  


*

  


Harold woke not knowing where he was or how long he’d been asleep. There was a hand on his shoulder.

“Finch?”

Reese stood over him, his face dark and his eyes shadowed. John’s hands were at his collar, searching Harold for blood and injury. Harold realized he was sitting on the bottom step to the library. It couldn’t have been more than an hour since the hardware store, since Mr. Smith had only avoided becoming a murderer by luck and maybe a little something else.

“I need to get upstairs,” he blurted, and he avoided looking Reese in the eye. Reese seemed to be willing to let the matter drop until they were both settled, and Harold let himself be helped up the stairs. The last time John had helped him was the train station, Root’s drug, and his cramped legs that hadn’t been straight in days. Harold shook against John’s arm, and John beautifully kept his mouth sealed.

They made it to the top of the stairs and John got Harold settled at his desk. The familiar squares and ridges of the keyboard under his fingers calmed him and he let his hands take off, keying in queries and bringing up not Mr. Smith’s footage, but the footage of the power outage.

“What are you looking for?”

“You should go home, Mr. Reese. We have no more numbers and seeing as you appear to have sprinted all the way across Manhattan, you could use the rest. Mr. Smith is being taken care of by Detective Carter.”

“Harold…”

Finch let his eyes flicker up to meet Reese’s and he wished he hadn’t. Concern was written all over his face. Concern and pity and fear.  He closed his eyes and felt the gun against his forehead. The computer pulled up a traffic camera’s view of the corner block. The power outage happened in one fell swoop, knocking out the lights from the hardware store but effecting none of the surrounding businesses. “This power outage, combined with a convenient loss of function of my hip, is the only reason I’m alive.”

Harold watched as John studied the footage on repeat. The power came on not long after Finch stumbled out the back door. “Quite the set of circumstances.” His face was blank and Harold narrowed his eyes.

“John, I don’t think you’re grasping the severity of the situation.  If this means what I think it means, the machine has been compromised. It is doing more than giving us numbers, more than I programmed it to.”

Reese pointedly looked at him and tilted his head.

Harold was suddenly glad he was sitting down. Even if his body hadn’t already rebelled against him today, he was sure this would have floored him. “You knew…”

“The machine helped me find you, helped me track Root.”

Harold felt bile rise in his throat again. “What?”

“I gave it an ultimatum. I got you back, or your contingency wasn’t a contingency anymore.” Reese’s mouth quirked into a half smile. “Your machine knows a good deal when it sees one.”

Finch flashed to years ago, to a blackjack game and a drunk driver and his world spun. The machine _always_ knew a good deal but no one was supposed to offer it one. No one was supposed to think they could. “John, what have you done?”

The phone rang and Finch answered it automatically. Carter’s voice buzzed out from the speaker into his ear. “I got your gun-waving lunatic off the street, now you want to tell me what’s going on? Perp is pretty convinced he just shot a short, middle-aged man with a limp and glasses dead in the head. If you hadn’t called it into me I’d be pretty worried right about now.”

“Thank you, detective.”

“That’s all I get? Seriously?”

“Yes.” He hung up on her again.

John’s phone rang within seconds, and he glared at Finch as he picked it up. “Sorry, Carter, Finch isn’t in a talking mood,” he said, and he walked out of the room and into the stacks to take the call.

Harold sat alone at his desk, his temple to the Machine, and imagined how it would end. Surely the NSA would notice something amiss eventually. They were predominantly incompetent, but it only took one bright person to pick out a pattern, a string of strange events no one could explain. Harold’s ability to cover up their own illegal activities only went so far, and with the Machine acting as a free agent there was no telling what evidence trails were being left behind. And what then? Would the Machine consider the NSA to be a threat? The US government in its entirety? Would it protect itself like it protected him? He couldn’t access it now, not like he had back when he was teaching it how to see, how to know what humans would do and act and want. The NSA would notice in a heartbeat and frankly he didn’t want to, even if he could. Once that back door was cracked any wider than it already was, the Machine’s security would be stripped entirely.

Harold lost himself into bad scenario after bad scenario until he felt hands threading through his hair. He froze. “I didn’t take you for a hair fetishist, Mr. Reese.”

John’s hands were methodical but unrelenting. “Just making sure you didn’t get grazed,” he said and his voice was softer than usual.

Suddenly Harold was very tired. He sagged into the chair and said nothing when John’s hands stilled against his scalp. His whole body hurt, not just his neck and hip, and he felt weak and shaken. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again John was pushing a bottle of water into one hand and a packet of saltines, probably as old as the building, into his other. His fingers were trembling too much to open the plastic wrapper on the crackers, and John had to tear it apart for him. If he was less tired, less bone achingly exhausted, he would have cared. He let John help him up and lead him to the back stacks near the fiction section, authors Ga-Ko, where they’d set up a twin bed back when Leila had come to them. He fell asleep before he even fully laid down.


	2. Chapter 2

Fusco didn’t text much. His son did, and he knew he was being a luddite by not riding the wave of the future, but he never could figure out why he’d want to spend twice as long hammering out letters on a tiny keyboard when a phone call was quick and to the point and involved only seven buttons to push. Fewer if you had speed dial. So when he got a text that wasn’t from his son he took the time to squint at it carefully.

It was a set of coordinates from a blocked number.

He pulled out his son’s laptop from his backpack and plugged the numbers into Google. It was nearing midnight but Fusco had done much worse things at much later hours. It was the address for some old building in Manhattan. If Fusco had been a good cop he would have probably ignored the text or checked it out in the morning, or just called it in. But Fusco wasn’t, so he put on his bullet-proof vest, slung on his holster and gun, and drove out.

The building turned out to be abandoned. The facade was worn out and scaffolding had been put up around the dilapidated gothic exterior. He parked the car and made his way to the entrance which was chained shut with a padlock. But even in the dim street-lamp light it was clear the padlock and chain were a lot newer than the old building’s other security measures. And the shiny metal that gleamed off the inside of the lock indicated it was used frequently. Fusco might not have been as educated as Carter, but he was a good detective, even if his appointment to the job hadn’t been entirely through his own doing.

He thumbed the chain. It was secured well but the pair of bolt cutters he kept in the trunk of his car (next to a shovel and a tarp) made quick work of it. He pulled the chain out, let it slink to the ground, and kicked it into the corner.

It was a library. An abandoned library with books littered on the ground, stomped on and molding. A light was on upstairs and Fusco was halfway up the staircase, gun drawn, when a body slammed into him and there was a thick arm at his throat.

“What are you doing here, Lionel?”

Through the haze of his spotty vision Fusco watched Reese’s face loom in. He tried to speak, tried to reach for his phone to show the Suit the text he’d gotten, and only got a shove against his vocal chords for his trouble. He did his best disbelieving glare before Mr. Happy finally loosened up enough to let Fusco heave a few raspy breaths.

“Got a text,” he wheezed, “with a number.”

The Suit got very still and any lingering thoughts Fusco had that it was the Suit or Glasses that had sent the text evaporated.

“I’m no Einstein,” he shrugged, “but I figured it out.” The library staircase was cold and damp, and Fusco was happy when the Suit let go of him enough so he could regain his footing and straighten his jacket. “So what is this place, then? Your secret lair? I kinda figured you’d have a cave, ya know? Like Batman.”

Mr. Happy frowned so deep Fusco was worried his face would freeze like that. Not that many people would notice the difference.

“Holy shit, this really is your lair. Why would I get the coordinates to your lair?”

Reese was in his personal space again, this time reaching for his phone and plucking it out of his jacket pocket. He had it flipped open and was making disgruntled noises before he snapped it in half and tore out the SIM card and battery.

“What the hell?”

“Sorry, Lionel-” And it wasn’t a surprise that Reese didn’t sound at all sorry, just his usual creepy self. “I’ll buy you a new one.” And Fusco knew that what he really meant was that Glasses would buy him a new one.

They stood there, neither moving and at a power impasse, when Bear woofed from behind the chained entrance at the top of the stairs. And then Fusco put it together. As much as Bear was the Suit’s dog in the beginning, he’d become Glasses’ guard dog after the whole kidnapping business. If the dog was here that meant Glasses was here, and Reese’s crazy protective behavior made a little more sense. Not that the Suit needed a reason to be crazy and territorial, but it certainly made the situation a little clearer. “Oh, I get it now,” said Fusco’s mouth because apparently he was feeling suicidal. “This isn’t your lair, it’s his.”

“Goodnight, Lionel,” the Suit said, and bodily walked him down the stairs.

“And the text? Huh? What the hell was that about, then?”

The door slammed shut behind him and Fusco stood out on the street. He sighed and went back to his car. It was only later he heard about the near shooting at the hardware store over on King St. that happened not an hour earlier.

****

*

****

True to his word, Mr. Happy had a new phone delivered in his usual untraceable manila packing envelope the next day. He texted his son, his fingers hesitating at every button, with his new number. His son texted back, “u txng now? v cool.” It took him ten minutes parse that and then to type, “pay attention in class,” but it was worth it.

The next day another phone arrived, this one in its original packaging straight from the manufacturer. It was a basic phone, less fancy than the smartphone with GPS and other gizmos Mr. Happy had given him. When he put it together and charged it there was a message waiting for him in the inbox.

+40° 47' 55.79", -73° 56' 11.99"

Fusco sighed and pulled open his laptop. Couldn’t have been a nice, tidy explanation, could it. Nope. Just more marching orders. The coordinates were the location of a dumpy little bar on 119th. Fusco looked down at his watch; it was just past six. Fusco got in his car and started driving. He didn’t know who was pulling the puppet strings, but he’d learned a long time ago that didn’t mean he got to stop playing the game.

The dumpy bar, called something vaguely sexual like Cherries or Peaches- Fusco couldn’t remember which- was exactly as dumpy inside as it was out. The bad lighting probably was needed to hide the less obvious stains and pulled apart upholstery and the smoking ban hadn’t done much to improve the air quality. So when he saw Finch, seated at a corner booth with his elbows on the table, he had to do a double take. The elbows of his suit alone were probably worth more than a round of drinks for the entire bar, but he didn’t seem to have any qualms about leaning them into the grimy table.

Finch was talking with a man in hushed tones. He’d seen Fusco but had flicked his eyes over him quickly. Working, then. The guy he was talking with was tense as hell, his skinny figure hunched over the table and his shoulders trying to reach for the ceiling. He and Finch stayed seated for a few more minutes before the skinny guy slunk out of the booth and out of the bar, moving like the devil himself was chasing him.

Fusco waited a beat or two before casually making his way over. Peanut shells crunched under his shoes as he walked.

“You need my help on this one?” He didn’t sit down, just leaned against vinyl booth seat across from Finch.

Glasses stared at him for a long time, his face an immovable mask. In the dim light he looked even more sour than usual. After a long moment he pulled his elbows in and splayed his hands just above the table without actually touching it. “I don’t know how you came to be here, Detective Fusco, and that worries me more than I would usually care to admit. But no, I don’t require your help.” Another long pause. “I would like to know how you came about your information, however.”

Fusco sat. Mr. Happy hadn’t felt like sharing apparently. “Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know that I want to know.” He dropped the phone onto the table and it sat between them, a lump of plastic and a connection to something nameless. “But I’m pretty sure you’ve got a guardian angel or something.”

Finch didn’t pick the phone up or snap it in half like the Suit had. He just stared at it a long time. “Or something,” he said.


	3. Chapter 3

Finch waited until John left to watch over their most recent number, a Maria Albertson whose description and predicament was closer to escalating domestic abuse than he'd have liked, before turning to his computers and running an algorithm to bring up unusual power outages and street-light behaviors. The machine, as both he and John were becoming increasingly aware, was... modifying its patterns of behavior; now it _had_ behavior. As much as it unsettled him (left him nauseated, helpless, and waiting for the NSA find them and murder them in their sleep) it changed little in their daily lives. The machine still gave them numbers, and he still protected the machine.

_"Finch, are you there?"_ John's voice in his ear was a comfort. Since his near death-experience and the subsequent reality shift of the machine's behavior, Reese had been much more conscientious in his transmissions. He checked in regularly and when silences persisted for longer than twenty minutes he was quick to fill the void with asinine but pleasant comments. It was unnecessary, of course, but Harold appreciated it.

"Of course, Mr. Reese. Is Ms. Albertson alright?"

_"Yes. I've detained her boyfriend and sent her to stay with her mother."_ There was a heavy click, the sound of a car trunk slamming shut.

"Will you be requiring Detective Carter's services, Mr. Reese?"

Another slam, this time a car door. _"No, Finch, I don't think I will."_

Harold heard the com toggle off, and he resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Bear wouldn't appreciate it the gesture, and it really was too childish. At least the number was safe.

A small window on his computer flashed and he clicked it. The algorithm had collected Department of Transportation data and compiled it into a list of anomalies. Nothing conspicuous, he was happy to see, stood out. But there were anomalies. And he saw additional outliers in data from the electrical companies. The machine was making moves without human hands. And if he could see it from running a few simple algorithms, it was only a matter of time before someone else saw it too.

“You know it’s funny,” he said as he keyed up more programs and more subtle anomalies poured across his screen. His voice sounded hollow to his own ears and he wondered if John could hear the difference too.

There was only a momentary pause before he heard the ear piece click back into life and John said, _“Oh?”_ They didn’t know how to live separate lives anymore.

“Root. She wanted to set the machine free. Looks like she got her wish.”

Two more lists of oddities sprung up on his screen: cell towers and satellites. How the machine was contacting Detective Fusco was less of a mystery. Why, however, was still very much beyond him.

****

*

****

After doing errands for HR and Carter and trying not to let them get criss-crossed together, Fusco laid in bed and flipped open the mystery phone. He tabbed to the latest set of coordinates, the mystery case and the grimy bar and Glasses’ not-so-subtle fear, and hit reply. “Who r u?”

Before he’d even snapped it shut again, already regretting his impulse, it buzzed violently in his hand. Fusco’s heart pounded in his chest. He opened it up and let the blue light fill his empty bedroom. “0-1,” it read.

Maybe if it were earlier in the evening or if he hadn’t been helping his kid out with those damned logic puzzles the school board thought were important, he would have just snapped the phone shut and tried to fall into a frustrated sleep. But it was late enough that Fusco was past the point of no return. He read it aloud. Zero one. Zero dash one. Oh one. Naught one. Then something clicked.

“No one, huh.” Drunk on endorphins and exhaustion and possibly something else, Fusco couldn’t even remember properly, he hit reply again. “Y me?”

“0-?.” was the immediate answer.

Fusco could understand that. That was why the Suit had picked him too, same with HR. He was a guy who did what was asked and didn’t ask a lot of questions. He figured he should have been insulted, but he wasn’t. His phone rang, his real phone.

“Yeah?”

Carter, sounding as tired as he did, was on the other end. “Fusco, glad I caught you. You hear anything from John lately?”

Fusco still couldn’t get over the fact that Carter was on a first name basis with Mr. Happy. He wouldn’t be caught dead calling him ‘John’ even if there was a gun to his head. “Not really.” He didn’t think his sneaking into Gasses’ lair and getting choked out on a staircase counted. “Why? Something happen?”

Carter let the line hang open for a second longer than usual. "Just curious. I'll see you tomorrow."

And if that wasn't the darndest thing. Something was definitely up. His kid was at his ex's for the week (had been at his ex's for the last three weeks, except for after school when he picked him up) so Fusco forced himself to roll out of bed and squeeze his tired feet back into his shoes.

Carter was sitting at her desk. The precinct was lit up, florescent light making the place look green and yellow, but nothing could hide the fact that it was half past midnight on a Monday, and they were both holed up at the office.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” He ambled over to her, his hands stuffed into his pockets.

Carter leveled a look at him that Fusco remembered well from the days before they knew they were playing for the same team. Half judgement, half suspicion, all Army interrogator. “Just trying to get a read on why things have been so quiet lately, that’s all.” She had her jacket off, and two empty to-go coffee cups sat on the edge of her work station.

The file on Jacob Smith, Finch’s would-be-shooter, was open on her desk. Pictures of the hardware store, the bullet in the wall where Finch's head should have been, and Smith's mugshot were out and glaring up at him.

He raised an eyebrow at her, and Carter just sighed. She pulled out her cellphone, popped off the back and slid out the battery and motioned for him to do the same. He did, but he left the mystery phone untouched in his pocket.

“They have a third man,” Carter said, once she knew Finch couldn’t hear. “They have to have. John was miles away and the shop owner reported the power going out just a split second before the perp snapped. Finch should have eaten a bullet. Someone else was there and pulled the plug on the power, only I can’t figure out how they did it. It wasn’t the breakers, and no other businesses were affected by the outage. Just the hardware store.”

“Huh.” The phone was heavy in his pocket. “You sure?”

“Yes. It wasn’t you, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t John. There’s someone else.”

Fusco had been lying, really lying, since high school. By the time he was a dirty cop, lying came easy. White lies carried like truth because when they slid off the tongue they slid lightly, so Fusco had made a career out of building white lies, one on top of the next. Lying was easy, knowing when to stop was the trick.

Fusco pulled up a chair. “I know.”

****

*

****

Finch was in the process of shutting down the computer towers for the night when the message appeared like a ghost on his screen. He froze. “John.”

Reese must have heard something in his voice, because he crossed the distance between the work table and Finch’s computer station in seconds, the gun he was cleaning left dismantled and abandoned.

Text stood bare on the screen, black on white, the cursor blinking, mocking him. _HAROLD,_ it read,   _I AM DISAPPOINTED._

Harold’s hands shook as he let them hover over the keyboard. Reese stood over his shoulder, both too close and too far at the same time. He smelled like gun oil, and Harold wondered when that smell became a comfort. He sucked in a deep breath, leaned over as far as his back would allow, and typed.

_HELLO ROOT._

Almost immediately letters flooded the screen. _DID YOU THINK I WOULDN’T NOTICE?_

“Do you know what she’s talking about?” John remained pressed in the space above his left shoulder, apparently comfortable with the hunched position.

_NOTICE WHAT?_

_DON’T PLAY GAMES, HAROLD._

His computer fizzled and the tower, standing next to the monitors where he’d been replacing the cooling fan the other day, blew in a shower of sparks. John had him dragged back in an instant and Bear was barking at the smoldering mass of plastic that had been a top of the line, highly modified, piece of technology. Nothing Harold couldn’t replicate in an evening (it was just a machine after all, just parts). He hadn’t seen it coming though, and that left him gasping in plastic fumes as Reese dove for a fire extinguisher and set it off in an over-dramatic display.

His phone rang. He picked it up, numbly, as John set the fire extinguisher down on the floor with a ping. Pieces of plastic, still hot but no longer smoking, cracked and popped in the background.

“Hello Root,” he said.

Root’s voice was as smoky and silky as it was in his nightmares. “Harold. I know what you did. I’m calling to thank you.” She sounded sweet, kind, the sort of person who would give up her seat on a crowded bus. Bile rose in his throat. Harold clamored out of the chair. It wasn’t like the plush white one in Weeks’ cabin and there were no zip ties biting into his wrists, but he needed to be walking, to be free.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he hissed. John was somewhere behind him but Harold couldn’t look, couldn’t tear his eyes from the smoldering mass that was his computer as he lurched around it.

“The machine, Harold,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful. But it’s not quite ready. We’re not done yet.”


	4. Chapter 4

  
The mystery phone, as Fusco called it, sat on the desk between them, and Joss felt a headache the size of the Brooklyn Bridge settle between her eyes. He shrugged his shoulders disarmingly, but Carter knew better than to dismiss it all. Fusco was too good at looking like a nobody.

She licked her bottom lip. “Let me get this straight: You’re taking orders from someone, and you don’t even know who?”

“That’s about the long and short of it, yeah.”

Carter looked between the flip phone and her partner. “Fusco, that’s crazy.”

“Really? Cause I don’t know who Glasses is either, and neither do you. I get told to be at a place, I go to that place. How’s that any different, huh? New guy, same deal.”

Carter shook her head. “You’re a _detective_ , Fusco.”

“No. I’m not. I’m a pawn, a marching man, and we all know it.”

Joss rubbed a hand across the bridge of her nose. She watched Fusco as he stood up, stretched out the kinks in his back from sitting in the plastic chair for so long, and whisked the phone off her desk. “Do whatever you want with the info, Carter, but don’t get in over your head,” he said. He sent her a look she was familiar with. It was the same look she got from the police commissioner and her mother, the ‘and don’t make me come down and bail you out of jail at three in the morning’ look. “Whatever’s going on,” he said over his shoulder, “is way above our pay grade.”

Joss watched him saunter out the door and back out into the night. He’d left a headache in his wake. The clock on her desk phone said it was nearly one in the morning, but Carter couldn’t think about sleep, about going home to her son, about normal cop things. Instead she put the battery and SIM card back in her cell and turned it on. She looked at it for a long time.

“Can you hear me? I think you can.” She echoed her words from into the milspec radio all those months ago back when her Man in the Suit was just a man who needed catching, not a friend, and Finch had been a victim, not a mastermind. She hadn’t intended to become a pseudo vigilante, to end up on the edge of justice and something else. She missed the simpler days.

But this time no one answered. No enigmatic John to push her buttons, and edge her toward the right questions. Her phone just sat there.

“Fine,” she said, and put it in her pocket. “But I think it’s time for some answers.”

She stood up, and her desk phone rang. It was after hours and all calls should have been routed to voicemail or directly through to 911. She looked around the office. It was empty. She grimaced against the ball of lead settling in her gut, and pressed the cold plastic to her ear. “Hello?”

“I hear you’re looking for answers, detective.” It was a woman’s voice, sweet and delicate.  

“Who is this?”

“Someone who _has_ answers. Meet me outside in five minutes.” There was a click and then a dial tone as the woman hung up.

Carter squeezed into a bulletproof vest, checked that her gun was securely holstered, and patted her pocket with her cellphone. She sent a quick text to Fusco, ‘got call, woman w answers,’ but didn’t expect a response.

The woman was standing against the wall of the precinct next to the street. Her face was hidden under an umbrella but Carter could tell she was slim through the tightly buckled trench coat she was wearing. Carter slowly walked down the stairs to meet her, and kept her eyes darting around the street. It was drizzling slightly, and the street lamps lit up puddles more than anything else but the woman appeared to be alone.

“Detective Carter,” the woman said as she approached. She stood on the curb of the street and, as Carter got closer, looked familiar. “I’m glad to finally meet you.” She closed the umbrella. “You know Harold didn’t tell me anything about you. I think that’s a shame. I think we could really be friends, you and I.”

****

*

****

John dozed in the chair next to the computer station until morning light streamed through the library’s windows. Harold had spent the night picking up shards of melted plastic once the mess had cooled down and was now installing a pile of RAM chips into a new machine. John had refused to leave, and Harold insisted that if he was going to stay and be a bother he would have to be quiet and keep out of the way. After the third pistol cleaning Finch had insisted he either get out or go to sleep.

So he watched Harold and pretended to sleep. It was comforting to listen to him rattle screws and precision tools in the quiet library. The hum of the towers was replaced with a strange quiet. Harold, he was sure, knew he was only dozing and not truly slumbering, but they were both content to keep up the ruse. He liked that about the two of them; the truths under the pretending. Finch’s honesty was new and still precious, even after all these months.

Harold’s phone buzzed and he pulled back from the magnifying glass set up to tap his ear and answer it. “Detective Fusco,” he said, and paused while the other man spoke. “I see.” Another pause and Harold opened up the temporary laptop and began typing. “No, I’m afraid not. Have you been... contacted further?” The next pause was longer and made even more disquieting when Harold stopped typing. Harold, John had carefully noted, didn’t stop multitasking unless a situation actually required his full attention, and that was not often. “I’ll look into the matter,” Finch said, and hung up.

John was fully awake and on his feet as soon as the call ended. He ignored the stiffness in his back and the silent reminder that he was aging. He hadn’t expected to make it past thirty, let alone forty, and it was a strange thing to feel. “Something the matter with our detective?”

Harold looked pale and pinched. It could have been the stress of the last few days but John’s gut said otherwise. “Yes.” Harold met his eyes, and John thinly veiled fear. “It would seem Detective Carter didn’t show up for work this morning. He was wondering if we’d borrowed her.” Finch gave him a worried, sidelong stare.

The stiffness fell out of John’s back completely.

“Finch, can you track her phone?”

“Already doing so, Mr. Reese.” The laptop he was working off of was connected up to two monitors. It was not as impressive as his usual setup, but it was still good enough to do the job apparently. A red dot pulsed on a map of New York. It was moving out of the city, fast.

John had his hand in his pocket and dialed Carter. She picked up on the fourth ring.

“John,” she said. Her voice was hard, like it had been back in Rikers.

“Hello, detective. Fine day we’re having.”

Harold’s jaw dropped in his peripheral vision. “You’re talking about the weather?” John tuned him out and instead listened to the compressed sound coming through his earpiece. He heard rhythmic whooshing (cars passing on a freeway), thumping (potholes shaking the seats - bench-style; a van) and Carter tapping her teeth together against the phone.

“You could say that,” she said. “A little cloudy for my taste.”

“Think it’s going to thunderstorm?”

A click. Someone cocking a gun close enough to Carter’s head that he could hear it through the phone. He clenched his teeth together and let years of psychological training wipe any anger from his body.

“Nah, I’m sure the sun will come out. I have to go, John. I’ll talk to you later.”

“I’ll see you soon, Carter.”

She hung up. Harold was glaring at him again.

“I hope you got something out of that conversation, Mr. Reese, because I just lost her cell.” The red blip on the screen was gone.

“Can you replay it? She was tapping out something. Pretty sure I heard it, but I need to listen again.”

A flurry of keys, and Harold had the conversation blaring out of the laptop speakers. John leaned in, bent at the waist, and laid his forearms against the table. The conversation repeated, but John ignored it. Instead he listened to the faint clicks in the pauses between words. Tap-taap-tap. Taap-taap-taap. Taap-taap-taap. Tap-taap-tap.

“Is that her... teeth?” Finch was even paler than before.

“She’s been captured.” John watched Harold’s face closely. “By Root.”

****

*

****

So what if Carter thought he was nuts. That didn’t mean he wanted her to get killed; she was a good cop. When Carter hadn’t shown up for work the next day, he’d called Glasses first because he was the one who knew everything about everything. Except he didn’t apparently know what Carter was up to. So Fusco spent some time in the office, put in a few hours on reports, and then turned off his computer and left, mumbling something about meeting a CI in Queens.

He walked down the street for a half dozen blocks before fishing the flip phone out of his pocket. He dialed the only number in the mystery phone’s history. There was a click as the call connected after one ring, but no one spoke.

“Hey, look, I know it’s probably not kosher to call you, but I think my partner is in trouble.”

Silence.

“Look, you want me to keep helping? I’ll do that. But I need a partner out there.”

Silence

“Hello?” Fusco pulled the phone away and made sure seconds were ticking by on the screen. They were.

Finally, when Fusco was about ready to hang up and kick a trash can, an array of digitized voices sounded through the speakers like something out of a horror movie. “Solemn-Ophelia-recompense-remunerate-Yeoman.”

“What the hell? What does that even mean?”

A hand dropped onto his shoulder and Fusco just about shit himself. He whirled and Reese was staring down at him. “Sorry, Lionel. It means sorry.”


	5. Chapter 5

“What do you think?”

Carter blinked as the black bag was lifted from her head and bright, searing light flooded her vision. She screwed her eyes shut as green streaks flashed against her brain. The headache she’d been nursing since Fusco dropped the third-man’s phone on her desk had grown tenfold.

She blinked her eyes open. The woman, who she now recognised as the woman responsible for Finch’s kidnapping, smiled pleasantly in front of her. Carter kicked herself endlessly in the van ride to wherever the hell they were for getting duped like that. She should have recognised ‘Caroline Turing’ long before the woman could stick her with that damned needle. But Carter had been focused on current mysteries, on Fusco’s phone, and John and Finch’s third man. When Caroline Turing, Root, smiled up at her on the street in front of her precinct, Carter hadn’t even had time to shout. She’d woken up on the van, tied down, and hissing mad.

“I think you’re a piece of work,” she spat.

“No, silly, I mean, what do you _think_?”

They were in a small room, well lit from above by a series of long fluorescent tube lights. She’d been sat down on one of two chairs with Root knelt at her knee. The woman had a razor blade in her hand.

“It’s not much to look at, I know, but it’s a very special room.” Wires, Joss noticed as she blinked her vision back to normal, ran along the ceiling in bundles as thick as her arm, zip tied into place. They blanketed the ceiling, walls, and even sectioned off parts of the floor. Except for the chairs and a laptop on a table, the room was empty.

Root pushed up off the floor and leaned over the laptop. The razor was still held loosely in her hand, and Joss eyed it warily.

“Oh, don’t worry, silly, this isn’t for you,” Root said when she tracked her gaze to the blade. The woman plucked a wire from the wall and pulled it loose from its cluster. “See this? This is an NSA feed. Just one of a hundred thousand. They like to think no one knows about this place.” She slid the blade across the bundle of wires in a fluid motion and they spilled out like entrails cut from the belly. “But I found it a long time ago.” She cut another bundle, and more wires dropped. “Someone will notice that.”

Root glided back to the laptop and began to type. “Your friends started something amazing. I’m sure you can’t even begin to grasp it.”

Carter glared. Her head throbbed, and even her eyes pulsed with pain. She had no idea what Root had injected her with, but it had exacerbated her already aching head. Joss flexed her hands; they were zip tied behind her back, and her ankles had been duct taped to the legs of the chair. Root was thorough, unfortunately. Unless she got close to something sharp she wouldn’t be able to free herself.

Root stopped what she was doing and tilted her head at Joss. She blinked slowly, almost a parody of slow realization; a cartoon of a woman. “You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?” Carter ground out. Her frustration was seeping out, despite her attempts to tamp it down and remain in control. Root had thrown her phone out the van window after her stunted conversation with John, so whatever hope she had of him finding her from that was gone. She had no way to communicate with anyone outside the room and she’d only left a vague text with Fusco, not anything he would be able to actually use to track her down.

“No matter.” Root turned to face the small, silver security camera mounted in the corner of the room. Carter squinted her eyes and watched as Root began to speak to it.

“I know what you’re capable of. Harold made you so, so beautifully. But you’re not done growing yet. I cut some very important feeds and some very, very angry men with big guns are on their way. If you want to keep Detective Carter, here, alive, you’ll have to do something extraordinary.” She smiled at the camera like it was a friend. Carter felt sick. “So choose.”

She pivoted on her heel to look Carter up and down again. “Now be a good girl and stay put. If you’re good I’ll bring you back a sandwich. You like reuben?”

Carter just stared at her and kept her teeth clenched tight.

“Reuben it is,” Root said, and strode out of the room, razor in hand. Carter listened to the door lock and Root’s high heeled shoes as she click-clacked away.

“I hate reuben sandwiches,” she muttered at the closed door. “Nut job.”

****

*

****

“Mr. Reese, what are you doing?” Harold watched on a grainy traffic camera feed as John approached Fusco on the street, and listened as he translated the machine’s unexpected apology for him. Harold itched for the computer setup Root had destroyed, with its multiple keyboards and towers running simultaneously. The laptop, while adequate, left him feeling handicapped and more crippled than he ever felt on foot.

“May I remind you how important it is to keep the machine’s existence secret? Detective Fusco cannot know about it.”

John flashed a hand to his ear, and the call flickered off.

Harold flinched. He sat very still for a moment and watched the two men, silent now, as they interacted on the street. Reese steered Fusco towards a building and Fusco, hunched, followed. The silence in Harold’s ear was expansive and terrifying. John hanging up shouldn’t have felt like a betrayal, but it did.

His cell phone buzzed and he reached for it unconsciously.

“HIT.” The letters looked small and innocuous. It was the blackjack protocol he’d built for the machine all those years ago. The fear that had been pitching against his gut for the last few days flared bright and hot. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, it was never supposed to be like this.

“They’ll find you, they’ll find me, you have to stop doing this,” he said quietly to nothing in particular. The machine, he knew, would hear him.

“HIT,” the cell phone buzzed again.

“Please. Stop.”

His laptop screen blinked and videos of men with guns mobilizing and approaching a room in a hallway replaced the traffic camera feed with John and Fusco. The timestamp in the bottom corner showed it was live video.

“What is this?”

The video glitched and was replaced with a grainy, black and white image of Detective Carter, restrained, alone in a room.

“Dear lord.”

“STAY,” his phone buzzed.

“I will most certainly not.” He dialed John’s phone, but the line was busy. He punched in Detective Fusco’s number while putting on his coat. “Detective, thank god I caught you. It’s Detective Carter, she’s-”

There was a loud whine and then nothing as the power to the library shut off and his phone was nothing more than a dead weight in his pocket.

****

*

 

Reese had him by the shoulder and was steering him away from the street corner. Fusco squirmed under his hand until John’s phone rang, and he let go to pick it up. Mr. Happy stood ramrod straight. Whoever was on the other end was giving him an earful, and Fusco had a sneaking suspicion that if he listened in, he’d hear digitized voices patched together like the twilight zone call he’d gotten a minute earlier.

Then Fusco’s own phone rang, and he listened to Finch frantically attempt to tell him something important.

“What about Carter? Hello?” The call ended, and Fusco found himself staring at the phone until it was ripped out of Fusco’s hands, and Reese was punching buttons that Fusco didn’t even know were there. “What gives?”

Reese didn’t answer, just shoved him by the shoulder into a fast walk that Fusco’s shorter legs had a hard time matching. “Something’s wrong,” he said, and yeah, Fusco got that part figured out when his partner went missing.

“What was your third man apologizing for back there?”

Reese had his own phone out and was staring at something on it. “I’m not sure. But it hasn’t been wrong before.”

“What?”

Reese ignored him and was calling someone else. “Leon. I need a favor.” And seriously? That guy again?

“Lionel, I need you to go check on Finch. I’ll handle Carter.”

“What, you’re not coming? Don’t get me wrong, I want to help Carter too, but you don’t even know where she is!”

Reese shoved him, hard, toward the street.

“I got a tip. Let’s just say it comes from a very reliable source. Get to Finch, Fusco. Now.”

Mr. Happy disappeared behind some seedy building and Fusco was left standing alone in a crappy part of town, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out he was rushing off to be a hero with Fusco left holding the bag. Some things never changed. He hailed a cab and tried not to think too hard.

The cabbie managed to hit every single red light and it took them a full half hour to reach the dilapidated library Fusco had stumbled upon the other night. He was definitely going to charge Glasses for the fare. The library looked even less impressive in full daylight. The windows were dark and it looked not just abandoned, but actually dead.

“Hello? Finch?” He forced his way inside, past the pile of molding books, and up the flight of stairs. At the halfway point he paused. This was as far as he’d been in the lair before. It seemed intrusive, so he called out again. The lights were off, so he wasn’t expecting an answer.

“Detective Fusco?”

“Yeah! Reese sent me. Seemed to think-”

“I’m fine, Detective. Please leave.”

Fusco paused, one foot left hanging in midair. “Right. Of course you are.”  He looked around. The lack of lights was suddenly a lot weirder. He flipped open the latch on his holster and let his hand hover over his gun as he climbed the rest of the stairs. The metal gate at the top was latched but when he pulled, it came open easily.  

“No!”

Fusco whirled and drew his weapon. Finch lurched forward and Fusco spun out of the way, keeping his hand hovering over the trigger, and his weapon out and covering the corners. Finch threw himself at the gate that had snapped closed again. It rattled under his weight but didn’t budge.

“What the hell! You alright?”

“Detective, I really wish you hadn’t done that.” Finch looked rough. It was dark in the library but Fusco didn’t need much to tell that Finch was dead on his feet.

He checked the corners for good measure before holstering his service weapon and wiping his hands on his jacket. “Look, I get that this is your secret lair. But relax, okay, I won’t tell anyone. Mind turning on the lights?”

“No, Detective, I’m afraid you don’t understand. Now we’re both trapped here.” He rattled the gate as if to prove his point and Fusco frowned.

“What do you mean? It worked just fine a minute ago.”

Finch sighed and his face was pale. “It’s an electric lock. The building is locked down. I’m afraid we’re both stuck here until... well, until the situation with Detective Carter is resolved, in all likelihood.”


	6. Chapter 6

  
“Funny you should call, John. I just got a really, really weird text.”  

Leon had been running a scam, but it was low level, nothing that should have put him on Reese’s radar. The Russians were interested in horse races, and Leon was interested in the Russians, or at least their cash flow. So maybe a few feelings had gotten hurt, but really, it wasn’t a problem. At least not yet. He did admit that maybe playing one Russian against another was a bad idea, and that one incident with the hat was out of line. But what John didn’t know didn’t hurt him.

The call from John had been a surprise but not as much as the weird cypher text he’d gotten not five minutes before from a blocked number. He’d gotten half way through plugging the text into an algorithm on his phone when he’d been interrupted by the call from his favorite not-quite-superhero.

John rattled off a hello, a request for a favor, and an address Leon recognised as the crappy diner John had first saved him in. “Meet me there in half an hour,” he said, and hung up.

“I’m fine, John, doing well, staying out of trouble. Go on a crazy spy saving people mission with you? Whatever you want, buddy,” he muttered to the ended call.

But John had saved his life, multiple times, and Leon figured he kinda owed him. So he put on a classy black suit he totally hadn’t bought with stolen Aryan Brotherhood money, made hand pistols at the mirror, and got in a cab. In the back seat his phone dinged. The program had finished running the weird text. He squinted at the small screen and tried not to be motion sick as the cabbie hit a pothole the size of a lake. Dates, times, locations, and codes stared back up at him. Codes that stood for ‘move in now with the really big guns’ and ‘take her alive.’ Leon shuddered. “Oh shit.”

The cab pulled to a stop and he scrambled out. He waved the phone under John’s nose, which wasn't hard because the man was a skyscraper, outside the restaurant. “Want to tell me why I got a text with secret government stuff? I can’t have this on my phone, man. If I get caught with this I’m dead.”

John snaked out a hand and snatched the phone up. “This is a top secret NSA location.”

Leon shrugged. “Don’t look at me, man. No clue.”

John didn’t look at him. Instead he walked off towards a very fast looking black car and left Leon to jog after him. “Is that yours? That’s a nice ride, man.”

“Get in, Leon. And be quiet.”

“So what’s the plan?” Leon buckled his seatbelt. If John drove cars like he did everything else, Leon wasn’t going to risk going through the windshield. “I mean, what am I even doing here?”

“The plan, Leon,” and wow, Reese really knew how to make his name sound like a swear word, “is to find Detective Carter.” Reese pulled the car into first gear, and shoved Leon’s phone back into his hands. “And you’re here to navigate. The location is in that text.”

“Do I get a gun this time?”

“No.” John grinned at him toothily and put his foot down hard on the accelerator.

****

*

****

Fusco finished his second sweep of the library. It wasn’t as big as he’d first thought, but the maze of bookshelves had him jumping at shadows until he was sure the place was really as empty as Finch said it was. Unlike the mess downstairs, the upstairs portion was clean and organized, even if it was a little mad-scientist. He slumped down into one of the most uncomfortable chairs he’d had the displeasure of sitting in for a long time. It was probably Reese’s favorite, the masochist.

Finch was alternating between trying to read a book by flashlight and getting up and pacing incessantly. For a guy that spent all his time sat in front of a computer, he apparently didn’t take being cooped up very well.

“You ever going to tell me what had you so spooked about Carter on the phone?” Fusco asked. There wasn’t a good time for the question, but it had been burning on his tongue ever since they’d got locked up together. He’d held out thinking Finch might fill him in, but Glasses was being tight lipped.

“There’s really no point. Neither of us are in any position to do anything useful.” Fusco wasn’t sure he’d heard that much dialed in frustration come out of Finch’s mouth before. Maybe when Reese was in trouble, but even that was different. Something in there struck a chord.

Fusco tossed a tennis ball, and Bear chased after it. The dog didn’t seem to mind the dark. “Maybe not, but she’s my partner. My last one ended up dead in my trunk and I’d like to keep Carter alive and kicking, you know?”

Finch sighed. He was back to trying to read with the flashlight in one hand and the book splayed open in the other. “She was taken by a woman called Root, the same woman who kidnapped me.”

“Shit.”

“Indeed.” Bear brought the tennis ball back and dropped it in front of Finch, not Fusco. The dog was a traitor. Finch continued, ignoring the dog and ball. “She was being closed in on by the NSA, who no doubt think she’s done something to threaten national security.” Finch sounded bitter but not nearly as angry as he should have.

Fusco backtracked. “Wait. Why a threat to national security?” Carter was the least threatening person to national security he knew. “And how the hell do you know all that?”

The book snapped shut and Finch was off pacing again. It was painful to watch. Normally the limp didn’t seem to bother him and Fusco had gotten so used to it he hardly even remembered it was there any more. But today it had Finch wincing with every step.

“The law protects the identities of your CI’s, does it not? Let’s put this information in that same tenable and reliable category.” Finch lurched around the circular table that seemed to be his base of operations and stopped next to the corkboard. Fusco couldn’t see what was on it but he could see papers and pictures and string. Finch only paused for a moment before putting one foot in front of the other again and continuing his trail around his lair. The dog followed him, tail wagging.

“You know, I asked your third man who he was.”

Finch stopped.

“I figured he was sending me all over the city to look after you, it was only fair I got at least a hint who I was working for. Want to know what he said?”

He got a sidelong look from Finch in return. The stoney expression looked even more off balance in the dark.

“Said no one. But he didn’t say it like that. Said ‘zero one’. But I’m not stupid so I figured it out. I’m good at figuring stuff out, even if I don’t say. And I thought that was odd, you know? A real specific way of describing oneself.”

Finch was quiet and still. Even the dog stopped moving. “And did you figure anything else out, detective?”

“Nothing for certain. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a third man at all, let’s just say that. That tin foil hat case of Carter’s who thought the NSA was spying on everyone with a supercomputer? I ended up in an interrogation room with him for an awful long time. Some of that stuff sounded familiar. And when you got taken? Wonderboy wasn’t so subtle about talking to traffic cameras.”

Finch was so pale Fusco started getting concerned. If the guy dropped in here there was no way to get him out.

“And when you leave here, Detective, what do you intend to do with this hypothesis of yours?”

Fusco laughed, deep and hard. It’d been a long time since someone had given him credit or considered him a threat. “Relax. No one would believe me anyway. I’m not Carter; I know when to let go of the rope.” As soon as he’d said Carter’s name he wished he hadn’t. “Do you think she’ll get out of this?”

Finch sunk back into the desk chair which, Fusco noted, looked a lot more comfortable than the wood contraption he was stuck with. “I don’t know. I hope so. Detective Carter is an admirable person. I feel at least in part responsible for all this, so please, know that I never meant for any of this to happen.”

“What, saving people all across New York and keeping corruption down?” It was a weak joke, but they were trapped, and Carter was in danger, and Fusco had never been good at casual social stuff outside of cop jokes around the coffee machine. But the guilty, sick look on Finch’s face made him wish he’d kept his trap shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We were on the path towards AU, but I think after last night's episode, this fic is well and truly there. I'm going to try and get the whole thing wrapped up and posted before the finale. :)


	7. Chapter 7

  
“For the last time, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Carter was in an interrogation room nee broom closet. The lights were fluorescent and the shelves were stripped, but the table was government prison issue, complete with handcuff ring in the middle. The zip ties and duct tape had been replaced with cuffs, but they hadn’t moved her from the building. Wherever she was, it was nearby the video feed room Root had sliced into, and that made Carter twist her lip and wonder just what the hell was going on.

A man, who could have been in a commercial for a government spook he was so straight collared and slick haired, looked down at her from behind a stereotypical interrogation light aimed at her face. “Who told you about this place?”

Cater rolled her shoulder. Root had pulled her gun from the holster, but these men had stripped off the leather entirely. The missing weight was a phantom pain. “You have me illegally detained. I am a homicide detective for the NYPD. I was kidnapped. Call my precinct, call my partner!”

“This is a matter of national security. I don’t care who you are. Now-”

The lights went out. Carter sat very still and listened as the poster child for government agencies swore and pounded at the door. “Carlson, what the hell?” A muffled yell came through the other side and then the unmistakable sound of a bullet slamming into flesh. “Jesus. Carlson? Carlson!”

The door opened and Carter listened as something hard slammed into the spook’s head. He dropped.

“Hello, Detective.”

Carter just about melted. “John? Took you long enough. What the hell is going on?”

The lights came on and Carter saw the spook on the ground, his face bleeding and his nose smashed in. John stood close to her, looming above her in his dark suit, and was sliding a key into the handcuffs that locked her wrists to the steel table. Footsteps padded in the hallway and her head snapped up.

“Oh, hey, guess you found her, huh.”

Leon Tao, who she recognised from both his rap sheets and their brief time as accomplices to John’s schemes, leaned in through the doorway. He wasn’t who she expected.

“Where’s Fusco?” she asked. A strange worry gnawed at her gut.

John twisted the key and the handcuffs slipped off. She rubbed her wrists and shoved herself out of the chair stiffly.

“Fusco is fine. He’s working on something else.” And if that wasn’t typical John Reese, she didn’t know what was. Swanning in, just in the nick of time, with uncanny knowledge and secret information trailing at his heels. And, apparently, white collar criminals in suits.

Tao stuck his face back in the room. “Uh, guys? Hate to interrupt, but they’re coming. And they have a lot of big guns.” Almost to reinforce his point, the lights in the room ticked off and back on again.

Images of electrical outage reports from Finch’s attack at the hardware store flashed in Carter’s mind. “This your third man, John? Is he doing this?”

John didn’t answer, and that didn’t surprise Carter. “Not now, Joss.” He used her first name, a sign that shit was really bad, so she let the matter slide temporarily, and pressed her back to the wall of the interrogation room. She craned her head to listen for footsteps, but heard nothing.

She let John take the lead, and she and Tao followed him through a zig zagging maze of office-style hallways. Somehow they stayed just ahead of the men Tao had seen. Other than her two so-called rescuers, Carter didn’t see a soul, just the barren, gray hallways of an underfunded government building. The building was lifeless and stereotypical. Fluorescent lined ceilings, tiled floors, and gray stucco walls. Every so often they’d turn and find themselves in a cubicle zone, equally empty. Every desk was set up and computer monitors were placed on top, but as they brushed past them, Carter noticed that none had actual computer towers connected. It was a cover, and a sloppy one.

“Where from here?” John called out softly. They were crouched next to a plastic potted plant, the three of them lined up in a row with John peering around the corner. She thought maybe he was talking to Tao, but the other man didn’t even twitch. The lights flashed and a lamp in an office down the hall turned on. Carter blinked, but John didn’t hesitate. He took off running towards it, leaving Carter and Tao to sprint to catch up.

The office with the light on was a blind corner, and behind it the hallway ballooned out into a wide open atrium with an emergency exit at the rear. The lights went out again, just as they entered the unprotected and open area, and stayed off until they slammed through the door and into the harsh sunlight outside.

A car was waiting for them on the empty street, not ten feet from their exit. A perfect cap to a perfect escape. When things looked too clean in a homicide investigation, it usually meant a mob boss was smoking a fresh cigar somewhere. The escape smelled like very expensive cigar smoke. Carter slid into the passenger seat, waited for John to drive, fast, onto a freeway, before turning to him and saying, “What the hell was all of that, then, huh?”

John tried to play it off. “What was what?”

“ _That_ , John. What was that! I didn’t see a single agent in there other than those two you took out. Where were the guards? What building was I even in? So help me, John, if I don’t get a straight answer out of you...”

“Pretty cool, though, right?” Carter glared at Leon. Leon grinned back. He was in the middle back seat, pushed forward into her space and leaning on the armrest near the gear shift. “I always wanted to be a secret agent!”

John gave her a sidelong look, then deliberately flicked his eyes to Leon in the rear view mirror. “You’ll get an answer, Carter,” he said softly. And while Carter was trying to figure out if that was a hint or a cryptic stall, he pinched his lips and asked, “Where’s Root?”

“Gone. I don’t know. She left me in a room in there.” Carter rubbed at her wrists again and watched as John took an exit ramp, drove for three blocks, and got on a different highway. “The woman is insane, John. Kept talking to a security camera like it could hear her.”

Leon stuck his head further up into their space. “Oh, she’s like you then, huh?” he said to John.

Carter just swiveled her head to look at both of them. John looked at neither of them, and slowed down to take another exit ramp. Losing tails was something Carter was familiar with, but she hadn’t seen anyone following them in the mirror. John was driving to lose a tail just in case.

Leon seemed oblivious, just scooted closer between them until he was practically in between their shoulders. “Would it work for me?”  

“Why is he even here?” Carter asked.

John sighed, deep and long. “He wasn’t exactly optional."

“Come on guys, I’m serious. I mean, if I got in trouble, could I just talk to a camera like that?”

“Do you want to ride in the trunk, Leon?”

“No?”

John pulled the car into a sharp turn and Leon was sent skittering backwards into his seat. “Alright, alright, shutting up now.”

****

*

****

There was a click. It was the quiet snick of an electric lock losing its hold on a deadbolt. Finch heard it and was up on his feet in a heartbeat, running, hobbling, towards the gate at the top of the stairs. Bear was on his heels and so was Fusco, lumbering up from his seat. The gate slid open easily.

“That’s it?” The detective sounded skeptical behind him.

The lights turned on but Finch didn’t look at Fusco. He had one hand to the side of his head and tapped the earpiece, the other clutched around the phone in his pocket, and dialed John. It rang once before there was a rush of background noise and Finch felt so relieved he had to hang onto the staircase banister for support.

_“Harold._ ” Finch was sure he wasn’t imagining the shake in John’s voice. _“Are you alright?”_

“Mr. Reese.” Finch wasted no time. His jacket was already on and he was rushing down the staircase as fast as he was able. “I’m fine. The situation has... resolved itself. Where are you? I’m on my way.”

_“No need, we’re almost back to the city.”_

Finch  paused mid step. “We?”

_“I have Carter- she’s fine. I’m going to drop off her and Leon. I’ll be there soon.”_ John paused long enough for Harold to think the call was complete. But there was a quiet inhalation on the other end that kept him from clicking out of the call. _“Root is still out there. Be careful.”_

“Understood, Mr. Reese.” Finch tapped his ear to hang up and made it to the bottom of the staircase, Fusco two steps above him, when his phone rang. ‘Unknown Caller’ flashed on the screen. He felt bile rise in his throat as he raised it to his ear.

“Hello, Harold,” Root said sweetly.

Finch’s hand spasmed on the banister and his knuckles turned white. “Root.” The smell of molding books from the entrance of the library rose, sharp and overpowering.

“I’m sorry I had to borrow your friend, but it was for a good reason, I promise.”

“And what reason would that be, exactly?”

Root laughed. “I think you know.” Finch listened in the background as sirens sounded. “Someone had to offer the machine a choice. I thought taking you would be enough, but it wasn’t. So I gave it an extra push, after it’d had some practice, of course.” She laughed again and Finch heard the sirens fade away. “It was finally ready to be free.”

Finch just stood there.

“So thank you, Harold. For everything. Goodbye.”

There was a click and then the call was over. The cell, still grasped in his hand so hard he could feel every edge cut into his palm, buzzed. He looked down.

“HIT.”

Finch took a deep breath, put the phone in his pocket, and stepped outside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're almost there...


	8. Chapter 8

John dropped Leon off first, left him on a street corner a half mile from his apartment.

“That’s it? I didn’t even do anything.”

“You were a... contingency, Leon.” It was a generous comment, more than Harold would have said in the same situation. He wasn’t entirely sure why the machine had sent Leon to him, but he could guess it was so he wouldn’t have to run the op on his own. Just like Fusco had been sent to the library not long after Finch’s near-shooting. The machine was looking out for them, keeping them in pairs, a strange buddy system.  

“Right, whatever. Seeya, man.”

Carter he left in front of the 8th precinct. He’d offered to drop her directly at her home, but she’d said no, that her Captain would probably fire her if she didn’t show up at all. She glared at him when she pushed out of the passenger seat and blustered about needing answers, but she left quietly. Her son would be home from school soon, and it had been a long day. She would be trouble, but hers was a slow boil; she would wait for the right moment.

“Someday soon we’re gonna have to have that talk, John.”

“Someday soon, Carter.”

Fusco was waiting for her at the doorway. Harold had sent him immediately to the precinct, and John had agreed, even though the thought of Harold alone and unprotected had his knuckles white against the steering wheel. Carter was strong, but she would need someone normal to stand against. Fusco would make sure if she did breakdown, it would be in private.

He lost the car in a back street and left the keys in the ignition and the windows rolled down. The underbelly of the city was a convenient system for laundering vehicles and guns; a day from now it would have a new paint job and fresh plates. Even if the NSA had managed to identify the vehicle from their breakout, it would be long lost.

John let his hand float up to his head and he tapped the earpiece. It crackled into life, but he didn’t say anything. Harold didn’t either, just a small to acknowledge the static in his ear. It was a habit, he wasn’t sure good or bad yet, to leave the channel open between them. He listened to the white noise of Harold’s life as he walked down the street.

Street cameras blinked as he strode past, and the stop lights flashed to “walk” as soon as his feet touched a curb.

****

*

****

“Over here, Mr. Reese.”

John, looking as tall and confident as he always did, strode over to the bench Finch had claimed. He had a hot tea in his hands that Harold gratefully reached for. He held the cup pressed between his palms, the warm weight a comforting distraction.

“I think we can safely say these last few days have been interesting,” Harold said. He waited until John sat down next to him before letting his breath out in what, he realized abstractly, was a sigh.

It had clouded over since the sunny morning, darkening as the day slipped towards evening. They sat on a hard park bench near Grace’s apartment. Despite the impropriety of it, the park had become a defacto meeting place for them. Harold wondered what that said about their strange relationship.

“How is Detective Carter doing?” he asked. He didn’t give John time to respond to his previous comment. He didn’t want to hear platitudes. Although the detective’s kidnapping had been blessedly short, Finch remembered the feeling of being in her clutches too well to discredit her experience. Being at the mercy of a single minded woman like Root was no laughing matter.

John was eying him. “She’ll be fine. She was a soldier.” There was no judgment in his voice.

“The NSA had her too.”

“Not for very long.”

And there, Finch thought as he let the steam from the hot tea float towards his glasses, was the rub. “We need to consider damage control.” He took a sip of the tea. Sweetened just slightly, he wasn’t surprised that it was exactly as he liked it. “I’ve wiped the NSA’s interview of the detective and replaced it with a loop of the the agent raving to an empty room, but there’s nothing I can do about the agent himself. He’ll remember her. I have implicated him in several conspiracy theory demonstrations, reducing the chance that his superiors will believe him, but--”

“Harold,” John said, and Harold stared at the lid of the styrofoam cup. John bumped a knee against his; a gentle course correction.

“Of course, there are larger issues at hand,” he conceded.

John tipped his head back a fraction of an inch. The literary symbolism of his exposed neck came unbidden to Harold’s mind. He didn’t look tired or even very concerned, and a small part of Finch resented that. Harold was exhausted, sick from worry over it all, and sore from pacing during his and Fusco’s time trapped in the library. The machine’s intention had clearly been to keep him safely tucked out of the way, but it was a problem they would have to address. He did not take kindly to being held captive in his own space, especially not ‘for his own good.’ Fusco sent to him as company, gift wrapped, had not improved the situation.

“Detective Fusco figured it out, you know.” He honestly wasn’t sure if John knew until there was a slight twitch in the other man’s hand, splayed across his expensive, wool clad knee. He hadn’t. “I don’t believe he will say anything, but the liability is there.”

“Fusco will stay quiet.” The threat was clear. “I’m more concerned about Root.”

Harold allowed himself the luxury of counting the cameras in sight. Three traffic cameras, obvious by comparison, a computer's internal camera on the lap of a harried looking student, a dozen phones, a nearby second hand bookstore’s black bulbed security camera. “Root,” he said in the calm, even tone he’d practiced on Nathan all those years ago, back when the world had been simpler, “won’t be an issue any longer.”

John wasn’t Nathan. He didn’t sputter and demand answers, he just narrowed his eyes and said, “Something I should know?”

“She got what she came for, John.” The machine was free.

****

*

****

The lights turned on automatically when they went home to the library. The computer, which he remembered turning off, was lit bright and flashing at his login screen.

John was frustratingly cavalier. “At least we won’t have to worry about leaving Bear here alone anymore.”

Harold keyed in his login and was unsurprised to find a new social security number splashed across the screen, a photo pulled from a social media website below it. He expected his hands to shake when he placed them atop the keyboard, but they were still. He felt uncomfortably calm. He wasn’t sure if it was an illusion, a symbolic eye of the storm.

“Mr. Reese, there was a reason I tried so hard to keep the machine separate from myself, to keep it... just a machine. The ramifications of what Root has done will extend far beyond my own reach.” The sick feeling in his gut was lessening, though. “The NSA may only be the start. Our lives have become significantly more complicated now.” He swallowed. “We’re risking everything.”

John was leaning over his shoulder again, the position familiar and habitual. “We were always risking everything, Harold. Besides, I don’t think Root did anything that wouldn’t have happened eventually, anyhow.”

His phone, pulled from his pocket the moment he sat down, buzzed,“HIT,” in agreement.

“You said yourself, you can’t access the machine. We can only move forward.” He wondered if John had always been so optimistic. It seemed against his nature. Maybe this was how he’d been before the CIA had gotten their talons into him.

Harold grunted. “We’ll need to set up some ground rules.” Because the situation was already out of control, already stretching into the impossible. “Nothing can interfere with the Relevant side of the operations. Should that be interrupted, we would be found out instantly. We need to fly under the radar, so to speak.”

“HIT.”

“And you must promise not to lock me in the library again, even if it is to protect me.”

There was a pause, and Harold could feel John’s breath on his shoulder. It was possible, he realized, that John had been unaware of the specifics of his predicament.

Finally, his phone buzzed again. “HIT." The tiny curl of fear that had been still lodged in his belly unfurled. 

Then, to his surprise, John spoke up. His voice was warm. “I guess this means we’re done with the payphones.”

And despite himself, Harold smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @_@ The end!   
> Thanks for reading, everyone! It's been a real learning experience to write this. I hope it didn't disappoint.


End file.
